If you’d like to find out more about updating the operating system, recovering it, pushing apps to it, or phone specs, you’ll find the information you need below.

Purchasing a device

Our device manufacturer partner has made the device available to order on everbuying.com, for US$170 including global shipping (device cost is $145, shipping is $25 and custom fees may still apply, depending on the destination country). The device is bootloader- and carrier-unlocked, and it utilizes a quad-band GSM+UMTS radio so that it can work with a wide variety of operators/carriers.

Important steps to follow first

There are a couple of steps you should make sure you follow for your particular operating system, before you start trying to update your device, for example by updating your Flame's version of Firefox OS, or pushing apps to your phone (both are covered below.)

All operating systems

You need to install ADB and Fastboot on your computer — these are applications that allow you to interact with your phone from your computer when the two are connected via the phone's USB charger cable. They are needed for Flashing your phone to a new version of Firefox OS, recovering from an unresponsive state, pushing apps to your phone, etc.

Note: If you are on Ubuntu you can install ADB and Fastboot simply by using sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot on the command line.

Note: If you are on Mac OS you can install ADB and Fastboot simply by using Homebrew on the command line. See Installing and using ADB.

ADB is a tool that you run from the command line. If you open your terminal/command prompt, go to adt/sdk/platform-tools and run the adb command, you should see a load of information thrown back at you about what you can do with ADB. Running adb devices should return the line List of devices attached, and nothing else, because you haven't got any devices attached yet.

But at this point, you need to set the PATH variable to point to the ADB tool, so you can run it from anywhere, not just when you are in the exact directory that ADB is in.

To do this on Windows 8 (Windows 7 will be very similar, but with slightly different menu options):

Right click on the Windows button in the bottom left and select Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System settings > Environment Variables.

In the System variables list, find the one called Path, select it, then click Edit...

In the Variable value text field of the resulting dialog box, make sure you are at the end of the big string of characters in the box, then type a semi colon (;), followed by the location of the adb tool on your system, which should be C:\Users\[YOUR USER NAME]\Desktop\adt\sdk\platform-tools.

So if your user name is jamessmith, you would enter ;C:\Users\jamessmith\Desktop\adt\sdk\platform-tools.

Press OK on all the dialog boxes you opened up in this section.

Close your command prompt, open a new one, and test it by typing adb devices. If it comes up with List of devices attached, you are successful!

Note: To open command prompt, Right click on the Windows button in the bottom left and select Command Line

On Mac/Linux:

In the Finder app, go to your home folder (the one with the house icon.)

If you can't already see hidden files (for example, system files with dots (.) at the beginning), go to Terminal and enter the command defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES, then restart Finder.

Open your .bash_profile or .bashrc file in a plain text editor like Text Wrangler or Sublime Text (it needs to be a plain text editor.)

Inside the file, add a new line PATH=/Users/[YOUR USER NAME]/Desktop/adt/sdk/platform-tools:$PATH

Save and close the file.

Restart your terminal, and test it by typing adb devices. If it comes up with List of devices attached, you are successful!

Extra steps for Linux and Mac

No additional steps should be required if you are using a Linux or Mac system, although depending on your Linux distro, you will likely need to add a udev rule for your phone.

To discover the vendor ID of your device, attach your phone via USB and use the command lsusb to view the devices deteced on the USB subsystem. Find your phone in the list, and note the initial four digits immediately following "ID". A common ID for the Flame is 05c6, so a udev rule in this case would be:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="05c6", MODE="0666"

If your device lists a different number, use that instead. For instance:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0666"

Make sure to run udevadm control --reload-rules (could be automatic depending on your setup), then unplug and replug and your device before continuing.

Extra steps for Windows

To access the Flame device with the ADB and Mozilla dev tools like App Manager/WebIDE, a USB driver is required. Follow the steps outlined in the below sections to install it.

Downloading the driver

Note: The Android Debug Bridge (ADB) must be installed first: see instructions above if you've not already done this.

Installing the USB Driver

At this point, connect your Flame device to your computer using a USB cable.

To install the driver, open the Alcatel_USB_Driver_Q_4.0.0_2013_11_11_noinstall directory within the extracted ZIP file and double click on the DriverInstaller.exe executable. You may receive a warning at this point that the executable is from an unknown publisher. If so, select the Yes button and the executable will be launched.

Click on the Install button to install the driver.

After the driver installs, you can check that it is working by opening a command line window and typing adb devices. This should list the connected device with an output something like:

List of devices attached
3561d02a device

If your device is not showing up here, check in the Windows Device Manager. Your Flame may be showing up as "ACER ADB Interface". You can confirm this by unplugging the device and seeing if it disappears from the device manager. Uninstall the driver software by right-clicking on "ACER ADB Interface" and clicking uninstall. Be sure to check the box in the dialog to delete the driver software. Now re-run the installer above. It is advisable to set the screen timeout on your Flame to something high (Settings > Display > Screen timeout) as Windows sometimes appears to reinstall the default drivers when the screen turns off.

Updating your Flame's software

We will have two main "channels" of Firefox OS software version releases for the Flame phone:

The first channel is our release channel. Flames ship with this channel and will receive over-the-air updates for future major versions, that is, Flames will update from 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.1, etc.

The second channel is our nightly channel. Flames can be flashed to this channel, and after the initial flashing will get over the air updates on a daily or nearly daily basis.

Base image v123.zip: A discontinued image based on Android Jellybean; you shouldn't use this anymore.

Note: Firefox OS images v180 and above are based on Android KK (Kitkat, 4.4); JB (Jellybean, 4.1–4.3) builds have now been discontinued and are no longer supported, so don't use anything older than v180.

Note: You can find out what base image your device is running using the following command: adb shell getprop ro.bootloader

Important: When running a shallow or full flash, your phone data will be overwritten: you should therefore back up your data before updating! See the Backing up and restoring your Flame data section for more details.

To install the base image on your device:

Make sure remote debugging is enabled on your Flame, using the Remote debugging/Debugging via USB option in the device's Developer settings (the option is different, depending on whether you have Firefox 1.3 and under, or Firefox 1.4+ installed).

Connect your Flame to your computer via a USB cable if it isn't already. Verify that the computer is connected to the device by running the adb devices command in a terminal.

Download the .zip file referenced above. Unzip it onto your Desktop.

Go into the directory you extracted the software into and run it:

On Windows, enter the directory in your command prompt, then run the flash.bat script using flash.bat (or double click the file in explorer.)Note: If flash.bat is missing, simply rename the flash.sh file to flash.bat, then run that. Make sure you have adb and fastboot installed and available on PATH.

On Linux / OSX, enter the directory in your terminal, then run the flash.sh script using ./flash.sh (previous instructions encouraged you to use sudo. Don't. It is really dangerous to use sudo with things you download from the Internet. If the flash script fails to see your device, please double-check that your udev rules are correct). If you do not see a flash.sh file, simply rename flash.bat to flash.sh first and then use the above command.

Font fix

After updating Gecko and Gaia to nightly with the v180 base image, there will be a mismatch between the fonts that Gecko and Gaia expects and what the base image provides. To fix this, download our font update package, extract it, navigate into the directory created by extracting, and run the supplied flash.sh script.

Note: Another option is to use the update_system_fonts.sh script, which will download and flash the system fonts automatically.

Updating your Flame to a nightly build

Note: For this current build, Nightly development builds of Firefox OS do not support A-GPS, which may lead to slow performance of GPS functionality. We plan to resolve this in an updated future Nightly channel.

Important: When running a shallow or full flash, your phone data will be overwritten: you should therefore back up your data before updating! See the Backing up and restoring your Flame data section for more details.

Before updating your phone to a Nightly build you should flash the latest base image to make sure the underlying systems are up to date. Download a base image and use it to update your device's software, as explained above.

Because the above step installs a fresh operating system on your device, you'll need to enable remote debugging on your Flame again, using the Remote debugging option in the device's Developer settings.

Pick a version and download both the b2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz and gaia.zip files. Save them inside a directory on your Desktop called something like fxos.

Download the shallow flash script and save it in the same directory as the above two files: follow the link, press the Raw button, then use your browser's save functionality to save the page directly as shallow_flash.sh.

For Windows users: Also download the shallow_flash.bat windows script and install Cygwin which provides a Linux-like command environment on Windows. You will need to install the default Cygwin base category plus the unzip package but shallow_flash.bat will do this for you if you download and copy the Cygwin setup*.exe to the same folder as the script.

In your Terminal, cd into the directory you saved the files in and Flash the builds to your phone using the following:

Double click shallow_flash.bat (with cogs icon) or run it from a command shell. It will flash gaia.zip and a single b2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz file.

Note: If you get a "permission denied" error when running the above commands, your shell script probably doesn't have the right permissions. Running chmod +x shallow_flash.sh on it should solve this problem.

Note: A "shallow flash" updates Gecko and Gaia plus data directories, as opposed to a full flash, which updates Gecko/Gaia, but also the underlying Gonk layer and associated binaries particular to that device type. This is why it is a good idea to update to the official base image first, as suggested above, then shallow flash over the top of that, once you've got the Gonk/binary layer right.

Once the install procedure finishes the phone should reboot into the updated build and display the first time user workflow.

Switch to nightly update channel

Make sure remote debugging is enabled on your Flame, using the Remote debugging/Debugging via USB option in the device's Developer settings

Download the change channel script: follow the link, press the Raw button, then use your browser's save functionality to save the page directly as change_channel.sh.

In your Terminal, cd into the directory you saved the script in and change the update channel on your phone using the following command:

./change_channel.sh -v nightly

Once the phone reboots, check for updates by going into Settings > Device information > Check now

You should now get nightly OTA updates to your phone.

Note: You can choose between several different update channels. Run "./change_channel.sh -h" to see the other channel options.

Fastboot mode

If flashing a new build to your phone fails to work, your phone may become unresponsive, leading to the phone rebooting in recovery mode. The recovery mode provides few options (Reboot, Update from adb, Wipe data, Wipe cache, and Update from sdcard). Unfortunately, selecting Update from adb triggers a sideload mode in which you cannot use the other adb commands. The adb sideload command would work but the various flash scripts rely on other adb commands.

You can force fastboot mode as follows:

Power off the phone (which may involve removing the battery in extreme cases...)

Plug in the USB cable.

Power the phone up again by pressing the Volume Down and Power buttons together.

The phone should now display the text "FASTBOOT": it is in fastboot mode and is waiting for a USB connection. At this point, a USB-connected, computer with adb installed should see the phone listed when the fastboot devices command is run. Note that regular adb would not see the device — only fastboot sees it. In this mode, you can use the flash script to install the last base image as explained above. As the script does use both adb and fastboot commands, you may see some initial error and warnings from adb, but the device should be flashed properly at the end of the procedure.

Emergency download mode

If flashing a new build to your phone fails to work, your phone becomes unresponsive, and the phone cannot enter fastboot mode, you can use emergency mode for recovery. A USB cable and the Emergency Download Tool are required to enter emergency download mode. Install this tool and follow the instructions.

Note: The tools provided are Windows only

Recovery mode

You can enter recovery mode to clear your phone data or manually update the firmware. There are two ways to enter this mode:

If ADB tools are available, make sure Remote debugging is turned on in the phone's Developer settings, connect your phone to your computer via USB and enter adb reboot recovery on the command line.

If your phone is powered off, press the Volume Up + Power buttons together.

When in recovery mode, press the Volume up/down keys to move the selection highlight, and the Power key to select. Make sure you have your phone data (Contacts, SMS, etc.) backed up before clearing data, and your upgrade packages downloaded before updating.

Backing up and restoring your Flame data

When using a Flame, you won't want to lose your phone's contacts and other data while upgrading to a new build (as explained earlier in this article). To backup and restore data you can use our Backup and restore profile tool.

To use this, first download it from Github at the above link. The easiest way to save it is to press the Raw button, then save the raw code as a .sh file using your browser's Save As... option.

Next, make sure you'll have the necessary permissions to execute this file: cd into the directory where you saved the file, and run the following command: